Settle & Sink
by rhododendron
Summary: The aftermath of 2x05 contains unforeseen effects. Allan's future is not as he expects, and the rest of the outlaws are forced to reconsider their actions, in both the past and the present. R&R, please. Repost.
1. chapter one

**Settle & Sink**  
Sections 1 through 4

Warnings: Small mentions of torture (nothing really graphic), and a little slash if you tilt your head 16 degrees and hum Scarborough Fair. Please leave a review to let me know what you think of it.

(bones)

Standing in the armory, a guard at his back and a full set of mail and helmet before him. He closed his eyes briefly, because suddenly the self-contempt and loathing that had stalked behind him for the past month (the dark of Will's eyes, the gleam of Djaq's sword, Robin's slow breathing late at night) finally, finally caught up, with a shuddering, jarring impact that made his feet stumble and his breath gasp short. Opened his eyes and slipped the chain mail over his head. Felt the weight settle and sink into his bones.

(fire and fist)

Alan knew a lot of things- some that he should, most that he shouldn't. The good of secrets lay in keeping them, and that was one thing he could do well. Lies to cover secrets, secrets to obscure lies. He told himself that the fire and the fist were better than the guard uniform, and believed.

(stake)

"Gisborne's man" really wasn't that different from "Robin's man" when you got down to it. It was a job and he was good at it- almost as good as he'd been in the forest. But when the similarities ended, it was all he could do to keep standing. "If you're not with us, you're against us" meant more when "with us" led to telling the location of the camp. The stake he was tied to was familiar and the sick feeling in his stomach was more bearable now, shirtless and bruised, then it had been in the past month.

(the great escape)

Tried to imagine the camp as he waited for the inevitable. Nothing came instead- black and wide and all-encompassing. Frightening.  
Found that he was halfheartedly expecting a rescue attempt and carefully, methodically obliterated the notion from his mind. They hadn't come the first time, wouldn't come the second.  
Went through the motions- smartmouthed the guard, charmed the serving girl.  
Received a backhand and a sympathetic look for his efforts and abandoned them.  
Lapsed into silence.  
Regretted things.


	2. chapter two

**Settle & Sink**  
Sections 5 through 8

(would not could not)

He was still flinching away from the blows, though his voice had given out already. Limp, disoriented, but cognicent enough to realize that the hot skin he felt slipping against his was not Will's- was his own, strangely fevered and disassociated. Bright-eyed and burning, he was glad that his voice had been ripped away, uncertain whether he would have been able to keep this secret for much longer. That was one thing Robin was wrong about- he had no choice now, would-not-could-not tell. The irony in the situation seemed funnier than maybe it should have.  
"You have something that I need. Tell me, and I'll let you go. You'll never see me again. Tell me!" Shouted words at his ear. Distorted, angry.  
_Not bein' funny, but you must be getting desperate._

(heat)

When the cool hand rested on his forehead, he opened his eyes (when had they shut?) but couldn't focus. Dark eyes, red lips, pale skin. Sweet breath, the whisper of satin over his own shallow breathing. Footsteps, and the hand withdrew, leaving him in darkness and heat.

(legion)

Allan knew why he'd done it, of course. The gold had certainly factored in- he wasn't going to lie about that, not now. It was a scrap of life-before-Robin, one of the few that hadn't been abandoned in the dark loam of Sherwood. Everything he'd said at the Inn had been true, and all the worse for its honesty. Because he hadn't meant to hurt Robin, knew that he would hurt Will and Djaq and Locksley and Nottingham and _England _if just one word slipped past his lips- but they all did, one word forming many, forming legion, and that was it.

(the good)

That was the thing about Robin - if you spent enough time around him, you started to want to be as good as him, as whole-heartedly selfless and committed.  
A year, and Allan had seen that Robin wasn't pure or invincible or great- had seen the small boy in a man's bones. Saw the self-recrimination and guilt and mistakes and fear that resided in him, and having seen, felt his own image fracture and splinter. Everything good in him had been Robin.  
Allan knew why he'd done it, of course. He'd done it because of the noose.


	3. chapter three

**Settle & Sink**  
Sections 9 through 12

(tighten)

He had dreamed of it constantly in the weeks after the flight to the forest, waking up wild-eyed and gasping, feeling starched fibers tighten around his neck. That single instant as the ground dropped away and he became weightless and too heavy at the same time. Allan had known what "a conversation" meant, and also what the alternative was. This time around, he was going to make the right choice.

(susurrus)

Remembered slipping under the wave of heat, pulsating and unbearably fierce, lapping at his skin and mind. Losing the feeling in his feet and his fingers and his arms and his legs until everything was fire, roaring and devouring and ravenous. Remembered his mouth, dry and cottony, and his swollen tongue. Time passing, moments or days, until the sudden coldness of metal on his wrists and the brush of air and the flare of agony and the impact of cool stone on the skin-that-was-not-his. Remembered soft voices and the slow, undulating susurrus of whispers.

(ruby)

It was a long time before he could open his eyes , and he had to shut them again as soon as they cracked open. Lights had burst, burning and disorienting, and he tried once more, slowly, feeling involuntary tears on his cheeks. Wooden slats. There was no energy to look elsewhere- or to do anything else. He could not move, limp as a child's toy, and panicked, fighting for some sort of feeling in his limbs. He found pain, which was enough and at least familiar, and exhaled. Something in his chest made a crackling sound and he coughed, suddenly without oxygen or thought. Felt liquid in his mouth and on his lips, and tasted ruby. Tried to draw a breath and failed, felt phantom fibers on his neck. Saw black velvet.

(sherwood)

Awoke the second time to a tightness on his chest and soreness in his limbs. Registered, for the first time, that he wasn't on the stake anymore; wasn't in the castle. He felt packed earth, shade, dirt, smoke, cold wind. Sherwood.


	4. chapter four

**Settle & Sink**  
Sections 13 through 16

(stockholm)

His eyelids had grown heavy long ago, but no way was he shutting them now, not when he had barely managed to open them. He was still crying, the light so bright that he could not make out his surroundings, and for a moment he longed for the castle dungeon again, and the knowledge that where he was didn't matter. He missed the dark and the cold, and shut his eyes.

(twist)

Djaq hated Allan for the briefest of breaths, a single nanosecond of absolute loathing, before coming back to herself. She knew Robin- better than any of the men, save perhaps Much, and certainly more than Marian, blinded as the young noblewoman was by love. She had seen him changing, altering irreversibly as the weeks and months slipped by. Saw him move from fighting for England to fighting for Marian to fighting for himself, for the tenuous grip he retained on his morality. He'd cast Allan out in a desperate grab at humanity, latching onto "traitor to me is traitor to England." Misplaced, maltreated, false nationalism, a shadowy reflection of a sentiment that Robin just didn't have anymore. A feeling that had simply been run out of his blood by sleepless nights and constant worry. Allan's fevered body, radiating heat and stretched unmoving near the fire, was a shattered example of what happened when the mistakes Robin tried to hide became all too visible. Mistakes rarely cost this much to anyone else, but Robin was Robin so of course he was different. He survived on his judgment and Allan, with his noble intentions (however they had turned out) had just twisted and warped it beyond Robin's ability to fix. Djaq knew him enough to know that he was a wreck, now more than ever, because Robin was Sherwood and the forest was rotting from the inside out.

(raw)

He feels different, not better, but _awake _for the first time in months. The pain is there; the lethargy is not, replaced by a need to be heard. He manages to force a sound out of his raw throat, one that is painful and monosyllabic, but it accomplishes what he needed it to; there is movement, and dark eyes appear above his. A hand on his forehead, and a cup of water at his lips.  
"I'm sorry." Allan doesn't know how to respond to this, and so he doesn't, swallowing the water instead and realizing how overheated, parched he is in the process.  
"Robin?" It's one word, barely audible, but he feels like he'll never be able to speak again.  
"Not here." Allan, whose mind has been on only one thing since he awoke, feels relief surge through his chest. He shuts his eyes and the hand leaves his forehead. Will never said much, because he never needed to.

(sand)

Much is well used to Robin assuming that their stories are the same, that Acre was Acre and they were in it together. For the most part, he's right. Days and nights spent together, asleep on thin pallets or exhausted and bloody and fighting, blurred the way that dreams are sometimes, until they stop, freeze, hone in on an image, a moment, a day, that could never quite be forgotten completely. Robin and Much, master and servant, together until Robin suddenly was not, was _not _together, was scattered and raving and almost too hot to touch, eyes wide open and unseeing, a dead weight in the hospital tent. A single mistake, a misstep, a missed block to an attack that shouldn't have happened in the first place.  
Years later, Much thinks about how their stories are not the same, are alike but flawed in the one way that could split them forever; an image, a moment, a day or more in the hospital tent. Robin's mistake; _his _mistake for not being there, not_ doing _something.  
Much watches Allan when Djaq and Will are sleeping. Feels his skin, and his fingers meet with hot desert sand and a bloodred sun.


	5. chapter five

**Settle & Sink**  
Sections 17 through 20

(abandonment)

Robin comes back to camp after everyone is sleeping and leaves before they wake. Money still circulates in the hovels and muddy villages; the good folk of England are not abandoned, because even in his deepest, hardest moment, Robin is not capable of abandonment. It was the same in Acre, and it will not change. He will not stop until he is finally dead and there is nothing he can give except his name. And in time that too will fade, crumbling into infamy, perhaps, or simply forgotten completely.  
He avoids the still form laid out beside the fire, and does not sleep. Mistakes are somehow more costly here then they were in Palestine.

(focus)

When Allan woke, he was warmer than he'd been in his entire life. The heat had been a background noise, as much as the trees and the wind, but it had suddenly snapped into focus, hard, demanding, painful. Frightening. The fire was unbearably close; there were blankets tucked over him, and he tried to struggle out of them. His chest was tight and he couldn't breathe or speak, tongue cotton-dry and throat scraped and it was all suddenly too much. He fought wildly, mindlessly, desperately, and panted and pushed at the blankets with ineffectual hands. It was fire and he was burning- he was _burning_, couldn't they see? The sheer heat battered at his mind, and when he moved the pain did, too, and in that moment, feverish, senseless, and exhausted, there was nothing Allan wanted more than for it to end. Everything.  
And then Will was there, eyes wide and mouth moving, and there were hands on his arms and a cup forced into his mouth and then-  
Then there was silence and oblivion.

(sown)

The camp was dark and quiet, but Will was tense and tired and he could not keep still. Thoughts were whirling in his mind, too fast to catch and too slow to ignore. Allan's chest rose and fell unevenly, and behind him, the fire grew dim. It was bitterly cold, the crisp kind that made your face tight and your hands so numb that if you were, say, whittling restlessly, you could cut yourself and not even notice. Will swore softly when he saw the red dripping onto the dirt, and hastily cradled his palm to his chest, crossing quickly to the small box with Djaq's medical supplies. He grabbed a length of fabric, wetting it and wiping off the blood that was filling his hand. He carefully cleaned it, examining the shallow line as best he could in the nearly non-existent light, and decided that it didn't need to be sown. Will wrapped it tightly with the linen.  
When he turned around, the pallet by the fire was empty, and Allan was gone.

(unforgivable)

He'd made the right choice back in Nottingham, but that bit of self-assurance did nothing to change the fact that he'd made the wrong one before, and that what he'd done was unforgivable. So when Will finally, _finally _turned away, Allan had silently thrown off the blankets he'd been loosening for the last hour, and padded towards the door. His movements were slower than he'd like, but at least he'd made it out. The cool air felt refreshing against his skin, and so what if he was a little unsteady on his feet? It was better this way, for all of them, and he wasn't going to pretend that anything else mattered to him right now.

A/N: I am The Lev ; yes, I think I'll be extending it. this is actually... fairly close to the end of the story. I don't have it outlined in my head or anything, but I have a vague idea. Thanks for leaving a review!


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